I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good idea that late this summer we’ll get a Hellcat-powered Ram TRX, but it looks like it’s happening. Brace for impact, everybody.
Ram has had a hard time coming up with a serious Ford Raptor rival, and it looks like the job previously done by the questionably-named Rebel will go to the TRX. TRX, as in Truck Really eXtreme. Or maybe it’s This Ride’s eXtra cool. Total Rage maXter? Trail Recon Xylophone?
The TRX, as a concept, is stupid, because it is meant to be an offroader, as you can see in the video posted by Ram today:
But as anyone who has driven an old hooptie with about 50 horsepower knows, you don’t actually need that much power to slide around in the dirt. That’s the whole point of driving around in the dirt. A little horsepower goes a long way. If you want to do haggard action on the street, that’s where you need power to spin a tire or four.
Then again, this modern age of factory off-road specials are built more in the vein of prerunners, Baja rigs, or sand huck kinda trucks, and these are realms where people want big power. I guess if your brim becomes flat enough and your energy drink becomes monster enough, you need five, six, seven hundred horsepower to play.
If it were me, I would be looking to the righteous guidance of the Chevy 454 SS, a street machine truck that looked low and mean and didn’t mess around with much else. But I’m not the target market!
What I really do care about, I will say, is what the TRX gets priced at. The Raptor is in the mid-50s, and the idea of a Hellcat-powered truck for that kind of money verges on a threat to public safety.